


how do we carry on?

by dreamsleep



Category: Secret Circle (TV), Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: F/M, TSC integrated into TVD!verse, post-TSC
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-11
Updated: 2013-03-11
Packaged: 2017-12-05 00:36:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/716853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dreamsleep/pseuds/dreamsleep
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He is what the world made him to be. <i>No</i>, she thinks. He is what he made himself to be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	how do we carry on?

**Author's Note:**

> Special thanks to danielmorgans/Laurie for beta'ing this. Or, you know, just enabling.
> 
> As usual, please lower expectations by 80% before proceeding.

There are things that Melissa has learned over the course of her short life, the biggest probably being ignorance isn't bliss. In the wake of the boatyard fire, Chance Harbor had tried to erase magic from its history completely, and in the end, it had led to more lives being lost than saved. Secrets killed.

Part of her wishes that she could go back though. Go back to being that child again, whose biggest problems were her best friends fighting, and boys. She would go through Faye's almost breakdown again, go through Diana's abandonment of her, if it meant that she had never discovered her magic. Maybe it would mean that Nick would still be alive. Maybe it would mean that they would have had a chance...

She stops herself. Nick is dead, has been dead, and the pain that it still brings to her chest is a reminder. She misses him, will always miss him. But nothing will bring him back now. He is the boy twice dead, and she is the girl still living.

Her eyes have been opened now, and it is so hard to look away from what she knows is there. There is an awareness there that she cannot be rid of. She knows when something is about to go wrong, she knows when there is a someone trying to take what is not rightfully their own. She knew good intentions, and she knows now to see beyond them to see the bad.

Her eyes have been opened, and she cannot look away from what lies beneath the surface, no matter how horrifying it is. _To not know is so much worse than to know,_ she tells herself late at night as she lays in bed, trying to find dreamless sleep. _To not know is so much worse._

She wishes it consoled her when she wakes up in cold sweat, choking on a scream as the memory of flames burn her bloody hands, and something cold slithers under her face.

 

 

 

Elijah isn't human.

It shouldn't be difficult to remember. Ever since that day that they were introduced, when he brought down whatever carefully constructed wall separating her life as a student from her life as a witch with one simple touch that felt like death and blood, she's never been able to shake the feel of him. That feeling in her gut that tells her to run, that feeling in her gut that says he is Other. Every sense she has centers on him, always, from the people he interacts with to the things that he does.

She begins focusing on him in that way because she knows of the danger he conceals. Of all of his siblings, he is the one that she has singled out for 'most likely to kill everyone'. For all of Klaus's rages, his sudden mood swings, his very real threats, he telegraphs them very clearly. Klaus strikes her as very much like Jake, maybe even Cassie. The calm before the storm always signaled its strength, as some sage, older dead person might say.

It was the charming, smiling, silent ones that you had to watch out for. She knows that real threats are wrapped in nice packages, that they are the ones that you least suspect. So she keeps her eyes on Elijah, because no one else is.

She should have known better, given that he began to respond in kind.

She supposes that it is partially her fault. Not for his attention on her. (If she can blind him, so much the better. She would choose death for herself over the death of her friends, always.) No, his attention brings reminders of other things. Like how long it has been since someone last saw her.

The choice that she had made, a long time ago, had been to linger in people's shadows. It was safer there, because she could see everything, intervene if necessary, and then retreat back to where no one could see her. No one ever talked about how the shadows could be suffocating, though. Linger there too long, and you started to lose yourself in other people, until you weren't a person anymore.

Her days of hiding behind others is long gone, but some skills still remain. How to make yourself so small that no one sees you. How to hide behind a smile while you screamed on the inside. How to watch people, because people always gave themselves away without ever realizing it. She did fine when she was younger, because she knew the people she was hiding from. Now that she's a little older, she understands that the game is played differently. The awareness that she has cultivated for years cannot be turned off, and now it has drawn attention to herself.

She hadn't been prepared for Elijah seeing her as she was, without any shields or defenses. Then again, it wasn't really surprising at all. He had been playing this game far longer than she had, ever would.

So she lets him look, figures that he won't find anything interesting and that his interest will pass. For her part, just because he's seen her doesn't mean she has going to look away. So she doesn't.

There's a lot to see.

 

 

 

The build up to the breaking point is not so much unexpected as it is gradual. She teases him first as a challenge, to see if there was more than a stoic, emotionless face. She poked at his mask and then watched as it fell away, slowly. And maybe because he could, he teased back. Flirting by itself would always be harmless. It was like looking without touching; the moment someone went to touch, the game had changed to new rules. She could handle that.

Then things begin to get personal, without ever crossing a line.

She starts noticing how often they end up alone together. For every cup of tea that appears for him, there is one for her. He holds doors open for her, steers her through with a hand on the small of her back. He adjusts her coat collar for her, helps her into her jacket, eases the wrinkles down.

These are simple, every day things that people do. He's being nice (or misdirecting her, she tries to reason out) and she isn't sixteen. She shouldn't be reading into it. She tells herself that he would do the same for anyone else, has done this for every other person ever.

She realizes she's in over her head when she realizes that she wants to touch, to change the game. But she is very sure that he doesn't, and that's a problem.

 

 

 

She makes up her mind one day. If it is so much worse to not know, then she has to know.

So she tugs him down and kisses him. Nothing fancy, just a simple kiss. She lets go as soon as she realizes that it has probably gone on for too long, thinks that it might be long enough for her brain to formulate the answer.

He isn't saying anything, might be as struck dumb as she is in this moment, but she knows better. She stepped too far. And at least now she knows how he feels. She tries not to feel hurt or disappointed. How did she really think he was going to react?

“Thank you,” is what she says instead of 'I'm sorry' as she pulls away. She doesn't look behind her as leaves, doesn't dare look back out of fear of what she will find there.

By the time she reaches her apartment, has shut the door, she doesn't realize that the moisture on her cheek is her crying.

 

 

 

She thought that by kissing him, it would sate whatever part of her wondered at what would happen if did do something. Instead, she finds that the longing she feels has increased, and that the answer to her question hasn't come, but has instead morphed the question into something more complicated.

Because she does like him, she realizes. She likes him more than she should. She is headed toward familiar territory, where the lines between professional and personal begin to blur. She has started to become blind and with him, she can't afford that.

She promises herself that she will bury these feelings for him as best she can, because she still has a debt to repay, and he can't, won't, shouldn't feel the same way. But she wants him and she wishes she didn't.

 

 

 

Nothing ever entirely works out as planned. Ever. She's never been good at hiding her feelings, not completely. The truth is, to make a good convincing lie, there has to be just enough truth in it to make it believable.

But when someone knows you, has seen through you, knows only the truth, that's harder to get by. You might as well flip a coin and hope that you guess correctly. The only difference between lying to the people who knew you and lying to Elijah was, instead of flipping a regular coin, you were flipping a double headed coin and betting on tails; you were inevitably bound to lose.

She still tries. She goes when she is needed, pretends like she didn't do something out of the ordinary. She prides herself on being able to look at him in the face; she doesn't pride herself on her ability to avert her eyes after a period of time, or the way her heart seems to beat that much louder when he's around. But the point is, she won't let her personal feelings get in the way of what needs to be done.

Her magic thinks differently.

It starts slowly. She has never done big spells unless it was absolutely necessary, and never alone. Small magic has traditionally been her specialty, mainly because everyone else was much better at doing the big things. But when it takes her longer to do a locator spell, when it takes her longer to do something as simple as move a cell phone across a table, she knows that something is wrong.

When she has trouble unlocking a lock, almost everyone knows, and she can't avoid the possibility that she had done something wrong.

At that point, she knows that feeling she's been getting in her gut, twisting and turning before being shoved away is not just nerves or something biological; something is eating at her, eating at her magic. If crystals were lenses to magnify a witch's self, she had a pretty good idea of what she would find within her: doubt, longing, and a bitter determination to avoid it all. So she does what she has always done: she decides to leave.

 

 

 

Except it is never that easy when you have a debt to repay. He knows it, and she knows it. And as much as she would like to run, she can't run forever. She doesn't have nearly enough time or energy to elude him, and let's face it, she'd probably be really bad at it.

So she stays, and takes the heavy hint from those who know her well enough to talk to him.

It doesn't go how she expects.

 

 

 

“Do you want this?” It needs to be asked, needs to be said. Always.

“Will you listen to me this time?”

 _Yes_ , says her head. _Yes,_ says her trembling heart. “Yes.”

 

 

 

Magic is not something that you can turn off. It inhabits her, will inhabit her until a flame burns out her cruet or until she is touched by a Sway. Though she may need spells to help focus her power, it isn't like it's not already there.

Her back arches as she rolls her hips to take him in deeper, his own stuttering underneath hers as she holds him down. It should alarm her that she has a thousand year old being beneath her, immobile. But she's past the point of thought, and his mouth is hungry against hers later when she lets go of everything, clenching tight around him.

She tries to apologize for doing it later but he distracts her with two fingers that slip inside of her, and a tongue that just _shouldn't stop-_

 

 

 

She wakes up in the morning, and slowly blinks awake. There is sunlight filtering through very nice curtains, and the unfamiliar feeling of high thread count sheets touching her skin. She stirs, trying to get a better idea of where she is when the arm wrapped around her tightens slightly.

She is suddenly awake, staring into ageless brown eyes and her breath leaves her lungs.

“Hi.”

 

 

 

Later, after she has woken up properly, she dimly realizes that for the first time in a long time, she has slept soundly, without even the glimpse of a dream.

 

 

 

She doesn't know what they are, and she doesn't want to stick a label on it like everyone else seems to. Whatever this is, this is them: a pair of people who are devoted to other people, but lack the reciprocity that they want, that they need. For the time being, they have each other to guard their backs, to seek comfort in. It's not perfect, because they aren't perfect.

His family will always come first. But that's okay, because her friends and her family will always come first too. In this at least, they can place each other second, and that's alright because at least this way, they will never misunderstand where they belong.

They will always be an Original and an indebted witch. But for a brief moment, they can pretend that what they are doesn't matter, that they are people who matter. For a brief moment, they can experience what it is like to be wanted, to be taken care of, to be appreciated.

It's a mistake, to fall in love. But that's exactly what she does, because love has always been her flaw. She will always love, she will always care, and this is her downfall. By loving something, she ruins it, and it would only be a matter of time before she ruined him too.

 

 

 

A month later, as she helps him to remove splinters from his back, brushes her fingers over the tattoo that she knows well enough by now, it occurs to her that there may not be much left to ruin. What she sees now, is a thousand years of survival. The skin under her hands is stone, weathered and worn but never broken. How many parts of himself has he discarded to become who he is now?

He is what the world made him to be. _No_ , she thinks. He is what he made himself to be.

She does not forgive, but she presses her cheek to his back, and breathes in deep. Perhaps in time she too will change him, whittle away at some part of him to make her brief presence there even as he does the same to her. And maybe that part of each other that they changed will also eventually be discarded. But it seems to her, as she looks forward into an uncertain future, that the more they change, the longer they endure in this world that doesn't want them, that there will come a day when each of them will meet their end, when there is nothing left for them to discard of themselves because time is their enemy and she will always win.

He reaches for her hand and she takes it, temporarily bolstered against time and a world that doesn't want them for the time being.

It is more than either of them deserve, but it is enough.


End file.
